


To Gay Panic!

by knaveofmogadore



Category: The Lorien Legacies - Pittacus Lore
Genre: Gen, implied stohn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 20:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16605083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knaveofmogadore/pseuds/knaveofmogadore
Summary: Ella comes to some realizations about herself and turns to the only (the gayest) person she could think of for personal advice





	To Gay Panic!

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I looked at all of my drafts, realized they were about either Adam or John, and realized school might not be the only reason for my writing burnout. I also wrote this in an HOUR so like,,, Who Replaced Me, What Do They Want, Can They Take My Finals For Me?

“Hey, Nine?” 

Nine looks up from the book’s worth of papers Malcolm had given him to read. Ella had materialized in front of him out of thin air. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and paint and chalk streaked through it. Her oversized jeans were rolled up into cuffs and splattered with paint, and her worn out green shirt wasn’t in much better shape. Paint meant that, somehow, she had been with Marina not too long ago, probably taking her frustrations out on a throwaway canvas. Nine drops the papers into a messy stack on his coffee table and stands up. 

“Hey squirt, I don’t remember giving you a key to the place.” 

Ella looked away for a moment, but while she was good at lying, she was never very good at looking guilty. 

“Sorry,” she lied, “I needed to talk to you.” 

Nine waved at her to talk while he shuffled the papers into a better stack and cleared out the trash from the living room. His TV and entertainment system were covered in a fine layer of dust, and the knick knacks and pictures on his shelves weren’t really in any good order, but Ella was sixteen, and teenagers don’t give a crap about dirty rooms. Through all of his speedrun cleaning job she remained quiet. He looked around for the easiest seat to clear, settled for pushing unfolded laundry off of the couch, and gestured for her to sit. Nine sat across from Ella with his arms folded over his knees, waiting. 

Ella rolled her shoulders, rubbed her arm, coughed, and made a big deal about dragging out the silence. Nine still waited. Finally she sighed, looked at the ceiling, sighed again in the way teenagers do when something is especially time consuming, and spoke in a rush. 

“How did you know you were gay?” 

Nine blinks, stunned to silence. He opens his mouth but all that comes out is a cracked and drawn out ‘uum.’ He coughed too now, hoping that by settling his lungs he could settle back into his own head. 

“Did you try talking to Marina about this?” 

“Yeah, she told me to ask you,” Ella says, deadpan. 

In spite of the situation, or maybe because the air in the room was getting too tense for his liking, Nine grinned. 

“You’ve been spending time with Adam too, huh?” 

Ella jokingly swipes at him and Nine easily dodges. When she laughs he knows he did right. 

“So, did you ask him the same thing,” he asked. 

She grew quiet and shook her head. When Nine tried to press she waved him off. 

“I wanted to ask you. Marina told me how she doesn’t feel...stuff, but I don’t feel things the way she does. I _feel_ things, I get crushes and I think people are cute in more than an aesthetic way and I can kind of see myself getting married in maybe, thirty years?” 

Nine laughs and she swats at him again. 

“Be serious! I like people in _that_ way but I’ve never wanted to date anyone before,” Ella trails off and ends her sentence with a vague and frustrated hand gesture. 

“Before,” Nine says slowly. 

Ella hides her darkening face in her hands before the red spreads from her cheeks to her ears. She groans, a sound that is full of pure teenage frustration and self loathing. She put it off in waves, the special kind of self pity that comes from being that age where everything has happened and not enough has happened at once. There is the perspective of loss, but also none of the experience to tell her that this is not the worst thing to ever happen to her. Nine moves to the other couch and wraps his arm around her shoulders. 

“Come on,” he shakes her a little, “it can’t be that bad.” 

Her voice came through muffled, “I met the prettiest girl I had ever seen this morning and I blew it by talking about krawls.” 

Nine’s face twists as he swallows his laughter. He pats her shoulder and makes sympathetic noises. 

“And you thought you didn’t like girls! This,” she tries to shove him away and he holds her in the brotherly bear hug of her life, “is the gayest thing I’ve heard since breakfast.”

Ella finally manages to squirm free by pinching his arm and sliding to the floor. Nine left her there for a moment to go to the kitchen. Cups rattled and cabinet doors slammed and soon, the microwave started running. 

“What if it’s not! What if I just wanted to be friends! What if it _is_ , what then?”

“Then you get yourself a girlfriend!”

Nine comes back with two mugs and kneels down to hold one out to her. She stares at it for a moment as her brain catches up, then takes it. He sits down beside her on the floor as she takes her first sips of hot chocolate. Nine rests his cup holding arm on his knee as he begins to talk.

“When I first figured it out,” Ella looks up from pondering the mysteries of the universe when he starts, “I was driving down the road with a beautiful boy in my passenger seat. I had already had too long by myself to think, and the road was quiet, and he was asleep. I had thought about it a lot, you know, kissing boys and how they looked and probably felt and,” Nine waves his free hand, “/stuff/. This boy, when I first met him, I thought he was one of the stupidest, strongest people in the whole world.” 

Nine obnoxiously slurps his hot chocolate, “I still do, and I love him with all my heart.” 

Ella smiles, “That’s pretty gay.” 

He snorts into his cup and has to take a moment to cough all of the chocolate out of his nose. She uselessly pats his arm while he chokes on hot chocolate milk and coughs for his life. When he clears his throat. he points at her threateningly, like he didn’t just almost get taken out by milk and chocolate powder, which only makes her laugh harder.

“You shut your sassy ass mouth, I’m not finished. So I’m looking at this boy, and the sun is shining on his face like poetry or some shit,” Ella snorts, “shut up, and it hits me that maybe other boys don’t look at other boys like this.” 

Ella leans forward like the story was on the end of a line NIne was pulling in, “And then?”

Another obnoxious slurp, “And then I didn’t figure it out for another four months, and now we’re dating. The End.” 

She blinks, “That’s it? That’s your big advice? Wait and maybe I’ll figure it out,” she asks, dumbfounded.” 

“Yup,” he said, popping the P. 

“That’s bullshit!” 

“Sure is! Also watch your language, Marina would beat my ass if she found out I let you swear.” 

Ella leans back and groans at her lap. Maybe she was actually groaning at the ground, the very earth, like the Entity would come back into her mind full force to help her through her sexuality crisis. Nine sarcastically clinks his mug against hers, drawing her out of her self pity. 

“To gay panic?”

Ella raised her mug and half heartedly cheered.


End file.
